Just a Small Fraction of Deaths
- fionacsweet
- Aug 11, 2020
- 2 min read
Yesterday, President Trump yet again asserted that children are "essentially immune" from COVID-19, despite increasing evidence that proves we are not. He downplayed a new report that found nearly 100,000 children tested positive for the virus at the end of July and said he does not think it means that school should stay closed. He said this at a press briefing at the White House: "There may be a case, a tiny, a tiny fraction of death, tiny fraction, and they get better very quickly...I think schools have to open. We want to get our economy going...I think for the most part, [kids] don't get very sick, they don't catch it very easily, and ... they don't transfer it to other people, or certainly not very easily."
However, studies and evidence are not on his side. Recent studies have found infections in children of all ages. Data from the American Academy of Pediatrics published on Monday found that more than 97,000 children tested positive for coronavirus during the last two weeks in July. This number is more than a quarter of the total number of children diagnosed in the United States since March.
A report from the CDC detailed an outbreak at an overnight summer camp in Georgia that suggested children do spread it to others and are susceptible to COVID-19. At this summer camp, 260 children and staffers (out of the 344 tested) contracted the virus after less than a week of spending time together without wearing masks.
So I now have to ask the question: am I just a number? To Trump I am. Gen Z has this great ability to crack jokes at this point in time to try to distract from the direness of this situation, but everything is getting a little too real.
All of our jokes on TikTok are becoming serious concerns. Do you know that cannon that goes off when someone dies in the Hunger Games? Gen Z began joking that our schools would do the same to us when someone died. But, we have a point. How do you break the news to the student body and their families? Do you send an email? Put up a bulletin board? Put it in the school newspaper? Suddenly, everything became a lot more serious when we realized that we have a leader that is willing to risk thousands of us dying to reopen schools. It became more serious when we collectively realized that we could be part of the sacrificial fraction. But I digress and I am thankful that our local leadership has taken the safe route and decided to close things down until cases here go down.
And Trump? Concerning the election,
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